Sosie got out of bed twice tonight and asked for three encores of “The Way You Look Tonight.” I’d rather sit in the dark, rubbing her back, singing thirty thousand encores than manipulate more endless streams of pointless charts and graphs.
But guess which one I’m doing right now?
Nothing like pulling the mom-midnight-oil to make four dozen sugar cookies and address 24 Tinkerbell valentines for Sosie’s school party, only to have her wake us all up at 4am with the lovely sound of vomiting. Adventures in futility.
Favorite Part: Because I let Sosie sample some (or maybe a lot) of the extra frosting, everything that came back up was florescent pink. Fabulous!
I thought hotels and other public buildings into which you walk on a daily basis and to which you entrust your life eliminated their 13th floors. Or is that just an urban myth generated to create plot points for Stephen King novels?
But the thing is, I could really use a little luck right now. In the next 24 hours I’m ATL > BOS > LAX. And along the way I have to give a presentation to about 50 global brand managers on a process and deliverable that I’m only about 37% familiar with. And that PowerPoint that kept me up last weekend? The one that I stayed up until 5am this morning revising (just as I predicted)? That’s going to the company’s EVP for review tomorrow, which probably means a few (hundred) frantic morning phone calls to finalize.
The thread that’s holding it all together for me is my two monkeys who are no doubt sleeping soundly at home. And how at this time tomorrow the three of us will be slipping off to five days in a sunny, warm paradise together. Well, them and the egg over easy, bacon, toast, and coffee that will be delivered to my door in roughly 5 hours. With all of that going for me, who need a lucky number?
Our neighborhood babysit swap has morphed into my way of bringing work home over the weekend relatively guilt free and actually getting it done. But last night I had roughly two hours of quiet post-bedtime swap time to cram in over seven hours of work. Left with the choice to forgo the bed my husband is warming for me, or waste a precious Sunday with my family, you’ll find me at home, here at the dining room table hunched over my laptop, deciphering spreadsheet stats and aligning pie charts in PowerPoint at roughly 2:30am.
I’m not quite sure how a working wife and mother breaks the cycle of burning the midnight oil. My days are a never-ending cycle of multitasking with next to no quiet moments for purely concentrated nose-to-the-grindstone type work. The commitment I made to myself for 2010 was to onboard a junior protégé to assume the majority of this work. But while I valiantly try, the deadlines still loom large, with clients sending their raw materials in at 8am on a Saturday expecting a Monday morning turn-around. And Sosie still frowns whenever she sees me take my laptop out of my bag.
At least now by picking back up this blog, I’ll be able to add a little connection to this midnight oil. Record these moments in an attempt to see patterns emerge. It has to be more permanent than the actual work I’m doing right now, sure to be completely revised by the client as soon as the sun rises on this new day. But no matter. I’ve got something to show for it all.
Alarm went off to start this day 24 hours ago. My time sheet is on overdrive today.
Still, probably better for me than for Jack Bauer.
